Beat The Track

Beat the Track is an audio-based singleplayer mobile game for iOS devices. It got developed during my last year at highschool. The developers were Stefan Kieleithner and me and the goal was to create an audio based racing game, that makes it possible for visually impaired people to have fun and compete against other players. The design process started with a call from my former Professor Dipl. Ing. Christian Hanl, who told us that a surprisingly high amount of visual impaired people are using iPhones, because the iPhone had a much better usability for sight impaired people at that time then other mobile OSs had. So in order to create a game that is purely audio based, different concepts for games got developed but most of those games were very abstract.

After the first supervision with Professor Hanl, the idea for a racing game was born, as he told us, that it would be much more exciting to create a more classical game like a shooter or a car game. After the idea was born, ideas for how the track could get displayed through audio got developed and tested. The ideas ranged from having a Co-driver over using atmospheric sounds to using the background music.

After testing out all those different possibilities, we chose to work with the background music. The right and left borders are indicated by the sound’s panning from side to side accordingly, while the speed is implied by the sound’s volume. The tracks got generated randomly through pre-created racetrack parts. With the creation of this prototype we were able to achieve the second place at the Jugend Innovativ Contest in the category idea.goes.app. Through achieving this we were able to be part at the AWS Sommercamp, where we got chosen to be one of the projects that will take part at the AWS first program. There we took workshops for a year covering topics dealing with founding of start ups. Christopher Lindinger (former employee at NASA and head of innovation and research at Future Lab Linz) was our personal Mentor for the project.